For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical evidence that the 150-mile long Tsangpo Gorge, possibly the world’s deepest, was the conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake Erie, drained catastrophically through the Himalayas when their ice dams failed during the last 2 million years.

Swarms of small earthquakes before a volcanic eruption can come in such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor. A new eruption analysis from Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano shows the harmonic tremor glided to higher frequencies, then stopped abruptly just before six eruptions in 2009.

In 1936, when Jesse Owens made headlines by winning Olympic gold in front of Adolf Hitler, nine University of Washington rowers improbably did the same in competition that had been dominated by Germany. An upcoming book vividly tells the tale.

New UW research shows that, in recent decades, fall is the only time of extensive warming over the entire Antarctic Peninsula, and it is mostly from atmospheric circulation patterns originating in the tropics.

In recent decades the thinning of glaciers at the edge of Antarctica has accelerated, but new UW-led research indicates the changes, though dramatic, cannot be confidently attributed to human-caused global warming.